I finally got my World of Warcraft character to level 70, so maybe I will be able to do something else in my free time. I've been stuck on the last two or three steps of painting those Clanrat Slaves for a while now, but haven't had the willpower to get away from the computer. In theory I will put the last bits of paint on the unit tomorrow after work and be done with basing and clearcoat by the end of the week. We'll see if I get around to actually doing it.

In other news, my little sister graduated from high school this past weekend. I think they could cut the graduation ceremonies by about two hours and no one would miss the omitted parts.

I've been thinking about selling my comic books off on eBay to raise money for a rifle, so today I spent a little while browsing eBay to see what sort of money I can expect to make. It appears that the comic book market is running a bit slow at the moment. I may have to wait for a while to see if it heats back up again before I try to sell my collection.

I still need to start painting my miniature for the May painting contest, so I may try to do that tomorrow after work. For now, I need to go to bed so I'll be able to get to work in the morning.

I haven't done any painting since my last post. I didn't win the painting contest last month. This month's category is Pirates, and I'm having a hard time getting started. I think I've finally got a miniature picked out, so maybe tomorrow I'll actually start on it.

I went fishing this weekend with my parents and my little brother. We stayed the night at the campground in my parent's camp trailer and played Chinese Checkers. In the morning one of my dad's friends brought his boat to the reservoir on his trailer and we headed out. We tried a couple of spots, but the fishing was slow, and we had to move around quite a bit before we found a dock with some Crappie underneath it. The two veteran fisherman were getting skunked on the Crappie fishing, so we went out to search for some Bass.

My brother had to answer the call of nature, so we pulled the boat over and he went off into the bushes to do his business. When he came back, he announced that he'd just peed on a snake. My dad wanted to go see what kind of snake it was, so we went up to look at it. It turned out to be a rattlesnake, and when it saw us it coiled up and started buzzing. My brother is lucky that he didn't get bitten, but not many people can say they've peed on a rattlesnake.

We found a pretty nice stretch of river for Bass, and pulled in quite a few. The veteran fishermen (my dad and his friend) did a lot better at catching Bass, and several of them were keepers. There were a lot of people on the water who didn't do so well, so even though it was slow, it was a pretty good trip. I even got a nice sunburn on my neck.

I got my Clanrat Slave unit painted up to about 70% complete, but I didn't have the stamina to finish them off. Hopefully sometime during the week I'll be able to finish them up. I just have to paint their weapons, do some detailing, and paint and flock their bases. Once I get that done, I'll have my 2250-point army finished and be just 22 figures away from my 3000-point army.

I've become addicted to watching PBS shows while painting. I suspect that my painting speed and quality suffers, but I've learned all sorts of things about technology, nature, and weird fitness shows with Willie Nelson soundtracks.

The Reaper website has many of the Warlord grunt sculpts available in the Boneyard section of the online store now, but there are several figures still only available in the army packs. Unfortunately, the figures that are unavailable as individual sculpts are figures that I only need two or three of for my army lists. I think I will scrap my Warlord plans for the moment and work on other armies until Reaper sorts out their Warlord miniature line.

Another Lesson Learned

Today I have learned that if you wash all of your pants at the same time, it pretty much limits you to staying in the house for a couple of hours.

My wife is approximately 2200 miles away visiting her family, and I am almost done eating the food she left for me to survive on this week. I suppose I should have rationed it out a bit, but it looks like I'll be living on Easy Mac and ice cream for the next few days. It is suprising that I survived the years between leaving home and the time my wife started feeding me regularly in college.

The good news is that I've mostly overcome my illness and I'm about 60% done with my unit of Clanrat Slaves. The bad news is that the sun is coming up and I haven't gone to bed yet. Hopefully I'll be able to wake up to wake up at a fairly normal time and do something with my day off. Then it's back to the grindstone for a few days of work and a long weekend with the National Guard.

A Case of the Crud

Today I spent most of the day drugged up in bed, as I've caught some sort of energy-sapping runny nose/sore throat bug. I'm hoping that I feel better in the morning because I can't afford to be missing work.

A couple of hours ago I managed to drag myself out of bed long enough to clean up and assemble the rest of the Skaven in my possession. Maybe tomorrow I will prime them and at some point actually put some paint on the figures.

Tonight I assembled most of a Clanrat Slaves unit for my Skaven. I'll probably have time tomorrow to assemble the last rank of the unit and spray them all down with some primer. I've only got eight more figures to purchase for my 3000-point Skaven army, and 42 more figures to assemble and/or paint. This Slave unit comprises the bulk of that number.

The Boise Warhammer group has a beginner's tournament tentatively set up for the middle of August. I'm hoping that I can have my Orcs and Goblins are finished out to 2000 points by then, but if not I can come up with a Skaven list for the tournament. It'd be nice to have two armies by then, though.

My wife spent a good portion of her weekend cleaning up the kitchen, so I figured that I should spend a portion of my weekend cleaning something as well. I cleared out my hobby area and boxed up all my miniature projects aside from the last few Skaven I've got to paint. I also cleaned out a bunch of stuff from the "back room," which is where stuff we don't know what to do with goes to die. At some point I'll be taking my big box of action figures to donate to a second-hand store, where hopefully they will be purchased and put to a better use than sitting on my bookshelf. There is still a lot to do, but I feel better about doing something. A big step would be to get the shed cleaned out and move the weight bench out there. Then the computers and hobby stuff (my miniatures and my wife's crocheting/knitting) could be moved into the small room and the "back room" could be converted back to the bedroom.

I also signed up for a couple of college classes in the Fall Semester, so hopefully I'll be able to further my education in some form and advance toward a degree of one form or another.

And as an update on the Reaper Warlord rants, it appears that no answer is forthcoming to my question about ordering individual sculpts from the army packs. I'll give it a few more days and perhaps repose the question, but for now my Warlord stuff is packed up and ready to be abandoned.

With the recent price increases on Games Workshop figures, I thought about why I am angry about Reaper's change and indifferent about the GW changes.

I think it's because the relative cost of an entire army doesn't change that much on the GW side of things. Most of their price changes target the blister packs and individual characters, which really only bumps the price of an army up by a couple of percentage points, as you only need a few such figures for the average army. The bulk of a Warhammer army is made up of boxed regiments, and so far the prices on those don't seem to be rising.

Reaper's changes essentially double the cost of an army at Warlord's typical point level (1500 points). There are ways around paying that much, but the results are still either a lot more expensive than they used to be, armies made up of one sculpt repeated many times, or a combination of the two. A casual player or army builder has no real option to get around the extra costs.

More Griping About Reaper Warlord

I am growing increasingly frustrated with the changes to Reaper's Warlord game. In the forums it was mentioned that people who don't want to buy army packs (9 figures, generally 3 each of 3 sculpts) or blister-pack singles (all the same sculpt of one grunt figure) could buy a variety of the sculpts from the army packs from the online store. After re-doing my army lists to represent the point-cost changes I went to the website to see what the prices on the singles are. There is no listing for them anywhere on the site as far as I can tell.

I have 7 units of figures that I need for my armies that all come in at the 4-5 figure mark. I'm unwilling to buy seven packs of nine figures when I'll only end up using half of the miniatures in each pack. If I went that route I'd end up paying almost $9 a figure. It just doesn't make sense financially.

And if I buy the blister-packed singles, I'll have units composed entirely of one sculpt. That is undesirable from an aesthetic perspective.

I've posted again on the forums asking if there is indeed a place to buy the individual sculpts, and hopefully there will be something that I missed in my visit to the site. Otherwise I will scrap my plans to build up some Warlord armies and divert that time and money to a different project, perhaps a Space Marine army or some sort of historical force.